On knowing when to disrupt your own creative patterns

Both of your parents are artists. Your mother is a ballet teacher, and your dad worked as an actor. They never told you to “get a real job.” Was being an artist ever considered a risk, and how did you start seeing it as a viable path?

I was always really encouraged to do the things I wanted to do, which were to play music, do shows, and do theater. My parents couldn’t really say “Get a real job” because that’s what my mum did, anyway, so it didn’t really come out very strongly from her. And then my dad, he did acting, but he was also a horse breeder. He wished he had done more acting, so he was very encouraging because he didn’t want me to not do the arts just as a way of making money.

I think when my mum and dad had us, hilariously, training racehorses was his idea of a more stable career. Didn’t turn up very stable, but anyway, he was super encouraging, and I was always encouraged. I just always was doing shows and dancing and playing music in school, and then at university, and then I never really did anything else. I do remember one point, looking at a house, and saying, “I’ll never be able to own a house.” And then, just the way luck fell, and Conchords got turned into a TV show, and I got to buy a house.

Sometimes I wondered about getting a job that would make money. I remember I would read the job ads in the newspaper, but there was no way I could do any of these jobs because my skills were so weird. I remember one time I had this job wearing a costume that was a boat to advertise the local ferry, and that became the inspiration for the Conchords show. I was handing out flyers, and I saw a friend who I went to school with, who was in a suit, and he was like, “Hey, I haven’t seen you in a while. How’s it going?” I was like, “I’m good.” He goes, “Are you still doing that theater stuff?” I’m like, “Yeah.” It was so embarrassing. It worked out great, but you never know how it’s going to work out. I’ve generally tried to just work on the things I like doing, and some of them make money, and some of them don’t. You just can’t tell which ones might make money.

You’ve worked on numerous collaborative projects, including Flight of the Conchords, The Black Seeds, and the Ukulele International Orchestra. What was the biggest creative shift that happened to you when you started working solo? What did you miss?

Working by myself, I miss the other opinions; it’s almost like dodging cars. Your ideas crash into each other, and they send you down a different path that you might not have anticipated. I miss that, having those other ideas that cause accidents in the creative process.

Sometimes when I’m working by myself, I try to split myself into two opinions and I jump between perspectives, even think of the thing in a different way. Criticize it or go from a different angle, just within my own head, to give it different angles. I miss that, but at the same time, even though it’s a solo project, I’m still working with a lot of people: the band and the studio, the producer. There’s still a lot of collaboration, even though it’s technically a solo project. It’s not really a solo.

You’ve been writing lyrics and being a musician for a long time. How do you realize when something that you’re working on is good or bad?

An audience is a very revealing tool when they hear something, and you get the response, but when you’re working on comedy, if the audience laughs, then it’s obvious if it’s worked or not. When you’re working on music, you don’t get that same instant feedback.

Sometimes I’m playing the piano, and my wife Hannah pops her head down and gets the phone and records it if she thinks it’s a good one. If Hannah records it, it’s a sign that it’s a good start. And then I usually have a bit of a feeling in terms of songs. Lyrically, I feel like you can sort of tell if there’s an idea that’s interesting to begin with, and then melodically, the way I think of melodies is you catch them, and lots of songwriters describe this. It’s like you’re fishing for melodies and you just catch them. The good ones almost are effortless. The harder you work on a melody, the worse it seems to get. That’s for me, anyway. A melody can come in seconds, and then I just play it round and round and round. If it flows really, if it flows easily, then I find it’s usually a strong melody, because often in films you have to keep changing things and editing, and they get more and more Frankensteined, and then they don’t work as well.

The show Flight of the Conchords was so beloved, and it ended after only two seasons. And part of it is because both you and Jemaine decided that it was time to stop. With all the possibilities and opportunities that are open to you, what makes you say no to a project, and how do you decide where you want to put your creative energy?

It’s quite hard to be in control of that because the work is a bit of an unknown river. One of the craziest things about my job is that sometimes I just get an email, and I’ve now got a huge job. Or a phone call, and suddenly my whole year has shifted. And I don’t know when they show up. So I’m not in control of my work, but you’ve just got to go with the flow of what comes along. That’s particularly true with the film work, because animated films take four or five years to make, and then sometimes they don’t get made. I might work on something for a while, it doesn’t get made, or something’s in the process of getting made makes the project stop. There are a lot of different elements. That’s part of why I started doing the solo records was because they’re a different type of project that I could be working away on in between the chaos of the show business flow. I just sort of go with the flow, and try to do the projects that look fun or interesting, or people I like are the ones I tend to say yes to.

In the past few years, you have been busy writing songs for projects like The Muppets, The Simpsons, and A Minecraft movie. For these songs, will creatives tell you what they need and want? How does the process of writing for film projects differ from writing your own material?

The films and TV they are always very specific. They need a song for a specific moment or a character, or a scene, and so there are quite clear parameters. When I work on my own songs, it’s so fun because it’s completely open. That’s part of what’s fun about it for me is doing something different.

Working on the solo records is also really helpful for the film songs because I learn different techniques or ideas that I can then use for the film songs. It’s really informative and it is connected. I’ve actually really enjoyed the mixture of working on the two different things.

The songwriting is similar. One thing I sometimes do is, I’ve got to write a song for a film and I often try to just sit down and play guitar or piano to warm up in the mornings to begin with and before I start the songwriting, and often I come up with a song idea while I’m doing that, and that might be the song idea that I use for my record. And then I pause that when it’s time, and then work on the song for the movie.

What is the song that took you the longest to write, and why do you think it was so hard to finish?

There’s a song that Jemaine and I do, it’s called “Stana”, and it took us 15 years to write it.

That’s insane.

It’s not even that good. We just kept on trying it, and we’d stop it, and then try it again, and we could never crack it. It’s ridiculous. And then the problem was we could never remember it, either because there are so many versions in our minds, or we could never remember which one was the one that we decided on. We filmed it in 2018, and I think we started it in 2002.

I’m curious why neither of you was like, “Okay, let’s let it go.”

Oh, we like it. We really like it.

That’s commitment!

The beginning’s really good. We just thought there was a really bad ending. Because it’s a story. We’d play it live, and you could tell the audience, it was good at the beginning, and then the audience was like, “What the hell are they doing?” It was really long. It was a 10-minute song.

One minute per year.

That took so long. It’s ridiculous.

You have written for comedy, for your solo projects, and for films. Is there a songwriting habit that you always try to resist falling into?

The resistance would be the immediate rhyme, but it’s hard to push against it because it’s really easy, and it works really well. I do really admire people who let the idea carry the music more than the rhyme.

You realize, once you’ve written a lot of songs, that you have these patterns in your own songwriting that you might not be aware of. But the other day I was working on a song and now I’m teaching and working with the band, and then we do another one like, oh, it’s the same chord in a different key, and then I’m like, “Oh, it’s really similar,” but you don’t realize when you’re first writing it. It’s a balance because some of those things are making your own sound, but push and pull against your own patterns, I guess, know when they’re good to lean on and then know when it’s good to push against them. Every songwriter has different skills. One of the things I’m naturally strong at is melodies. Some people find melodies hard. For me, melodies are quite natural and quite easy. Sometimes my songs can be too catchy. Sometimes I can push against that catchiness. But I just end up rhyming.

Your first solo album was released when you were in your 40s. What happened that you decided, okay, it’s time for my own now?

When I released it because I did it as a side project, but in between working on these films, it’s something fun to do. It wasn’t until I started doing press that I realized people were going to think this was a big step out, but it wasn’t intentional. I wasn’t like, “Here’s my big solo record. This is my big statement.” It was more like, oh, this is a fun thing I’ve been working on.

Following on from making statements, you named that album Songs Without Jokes. Was that to make a statement?

Yeah.

Was it for the industry? For the audience?

For the audience. It’s interesting because everyone I spoke to, they’d say, “What are you up to?” and I was like, “Oh, I’m making a record.” They’d be like, “Okay, what sort of thing?” I’m like, “Well, it’s kind of a song without jokes,” and they’re like, “Oh, okay.” They even presumed it was going to be a comedy record, so I just called it that. But then some people thought that was a joke, so then they were still confused. It didn’t really help.

It’s amazing how challenging it is for the audience to cope with the change. People just are very comfortable; they really want to hear the same thing from the person that they know. So it was quite hard for the Conchords audience not to get their head around being a non-comedy album. I didn’t anticipate how hard that would be for the audience, conceptually. Once they come to the show and watch it live, I think people are like, Oh, they get it.

The live show is still quite funny because I’m chatting away, bantering away, and gags and stuff. It is interesting to release a non-comedy record, and I get it. If a comedian released a music album, I’d be pretty skeptical, and yet that’s what I did, but I never really thought of myself as a comedian. For people who knew me, it wasn’t that big a surprise, but for people who only know Conchords, it seems like quite an unusual thing to do.

Did you have a concept in mind for Freak Out City, of what you wanted this new album to be?

No, I collected songs over a year, I guess, or so. I didn’t have a concept, so I just collected the songs that I liked. And then I recorded quite a few more, and those are just the ones that came through, and I was very happy with. I toured with the band on the last album, and some of these songs I wrote around then because I wanted some songs that were more alive-feeling. In terms of the sound, I wanted to capture more groups of musicians in a room, the energy of that, and then the lyrics and the song content. It’s still a continuation of the last album, where I’m sort of exploring sincerity and honesty, but this time it’s more playful.

Usually, we only notice the good things, the Oscars, the awards, and the recognition, but have you ever worked on something for a long time that didn’t come through? How did you handle that?

Oh, disgusting. I worked on Paddington the Musical for two years, and it fell apart during COVID. My friend and I loved it. My friend was writing, and I was doing the songs. We’d worked in London, worked in New Zealand, and we worked in LA. We’d done so much work on it. We had the scripts, and I’d written 12 songs, and we thought it was great, but it fell apart because everything got locked down, and we couldn’t workshop it. It was a disaster. I remember just having to go for a run on the coast, so I was running around and having trouble breathing, you know that feeling, hard to breathe like, “oh.” In the shows, the Paddington musical, it was really fun. What was so sad was that I really liked the writer, and we thought we were onto something really special, and we were laughing so much and so proud of it, and we thought it was really beautiful and super funny. So we were just devastated.

The vision wasn’t seen. I think we just hadn’t communicated the vision properly, and there were things that we saw that maybe we hadn’t gotten into the page or into the recording, the demos, that we knew would happen in the process, but COVID stopped the process. I was gutted, but luckily I’ve always got a few projects on the go. One really great thing is that the friendship with the writer has carried on, so I’ve made a great friend. The relationships are the thing that keep you going when the projects themselves collapse. Something great came out of it: a great friendship. So it’s not bad, but that was a tough one. I can do a solo record, and it gets made. I can do a record and just put it out. That’s one of the great things about recording, making music is that it just exists and has its own life, which is really beautiful.

You acted in Lord of the Rings, you have an Oscar, a Grammy, a devoted fan audience, and you’re working on several film projects. Looking back, how has the idea of being successful evolved during the past 20 years?

Well, as I get older, the idea of my family being happy and healthy is really the success, but that wasn’t the case when I was younger. I was on a mission to make movies and do shows. I was traveling, doing shows and stuff, and that was the idea of success. Enjoying what I’m doing has become more important. That’s always been important, but I think that I see friends who’ve had success in their lives, raising their families, or I see their success, and there are things about their lives that I think are more successful than my life if I’ve had success in TV and film.

There are different wins you can have in life. One different thing is I used to go to LA, and the idea of working there seemed like something you are striving for, trying to work in TV, trying it in film…The possibilities seemed amazing, and now I’m probably more excited about being in New Zealand and going for a swim in the ocean.

Anything you would like to add after reflecting on all the things that we touched on?

There’s one description I came across when people asked me about songwriting. Sometimes when I am writing a song and the idea first appears, it’s a little bit like when you’re flying in a dream. It’s a great feeling, and then you are aware that you are dreaming, and then something might happen where I hit a wrong chord or I sing a bad rhyme, a bad lyric, and you wake up, but if you jump back, if you close your eyes quickly enough, you can get back into the same dream and carry on. That’s what songwriting feels like to me. What I love about it is I can be writing a song and, honestly, it could be five minutes or an hour, and I haven’t had any sense of time, and that’s what makes me love songwriting.

I’ve been so lucky to get lots of different opportunities and work I get to do. And there’s a little bit of songwriting coming out of the stories. Those are the areas where I just lose track of time. I think that’s the sign that you love something.